Rodney Hide on taxpayers dollars funding attacks on NZ industry

Rodney Hide writes in the NBR about the fishing hit job perpetrated by German eco-terrorists, the President of the Labour party, Nigel Haworth, and the media party:

The University of Auckland was recently party to an orchestrated hit on New Zealand fishing.

A press release trumpeted “New Zealand Fishery Catch Estimated at 2.7 times More Than Reported” with theirs “the best estimate to date.”

Their estimate is not the best. It’s junk.

The research paper was circulated ahead on embargo to opposition parties and environmental groups. That maximised the hit. The report’s partisanship was reinforced with one of the authors being Nigel Haworth, president of the New Zealand Labour Party.

The report also served to leak a “preliminary investigation report” of compliance investigation undertaken by the government back in 2012 and 2103. It’s not usual to have university reports leaking government material.

Their own report is pseudo-science at best, but actually a political hit job based on guesses and no demonstrable or provable facts.

The upshot was the BBC running the news that, “A leaked New Zealand government memo casts serious doubts on the sustainability of fish that are widely used in McDonald’s restaurants.”

German environmentalist Barbara Maas, privy to what was in the report ahead its release, called on McDonald’s to drop New Zealand hoki in their fillet-of-fish to “save the Maui’s dolphins.”

In the swirl of the media hit it didn’t matter that the hoki fishery is hundreds of kilometres south of where the dolphins live and doesn’t use set nets. There’s no danger to dolphins from hoki fishing.

There was no rush to clarification from the report’s authors.

A political and industrial hit job predicated on a lie. It was shameful the Media party ran it, and thus far haven’t retracted the claims or investigated the willing liars in the campaign against our fishing industry.

For the record the international and independent Marine Stewardship Council report says: “In 2001, New Zealand hoki was the first large-scale whitefish fishery to achieve MSC certification [the gold standard in fishery sustainability]. The fishery was subsequently recertified in 2007 and 2012.”

Since 2001, hoki stocks have more than doubled. The Hoki fishery is a fishing success story.

The attack is nonsense.

And based on a lie

The university research paper established the massive overfishing figure of 2.7 across all fisheries over 63 years correct to a decimal point by talking to people, writing down their numbers, getting other numbers, averaging them and then connecting the dots.

The method, the researchers explain, was “critical realism” with the 308 interviews following the “Appreciative Inquiry” approach. The interviews weren’t judgmental, with the researchers recognising that “reality can only be partially observed by a single individual.”

The data obtained were averaged and extrapolated.

“When a range of values was evident for a particular anchor point, we used the mean. We used linear interpolation to calculate the missing data between anchor points.”

The results from the interviews were assumed representative.

“The total estimate was calculated by applying the average individual estimate to the total number of fishers for each year and summed.”

The study is not replicable and not credible.

A bit like climate science. Not a single prediction has come to pass. Not a single model has proved true. The data is massaged and manipulated so as to not fit for a proper scientific purpose.

People in government and industry have been working long and hard for decades to make New Zealand fishing an economic and environmental success.

It is also disgusting that the Media party were involved and haven’t recanted when the facts prove otherwise. That makes them complicit and it is little wonder they are no longer trusted by the public.

– NBR

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As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. And when he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet, and as a result he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist that takes no prisoners.